Subscribe to this blog

Subscribe

Search This Blog

Pages

Summer Wardrobe

The temperature has gone up into the forties and it is only April. I was very uncomfortable as most of my clothes are made of synthetic materials. And they are so old that I am tired of them. I took a look through my wardrobe lately and wanted to throw every single item into the bin!

I went to see my dress designer immediately! Dress designer? Well there's this friend of mine, Richa, who is a member of the Sikh community, married to a man in the same community as my husband. We get along well, Richa and I. She owns a small shop and sells cloth for making suits and all types of dresses. She has a tailor working with her and he makes the clothes as per the customer's specification. But Richa is a very good designer, so I usually go with her ideas. So I went and had a look at what cloth Richa had available.

"I don't just need a new dress," I told her. "I need a new wardrobe." So she advised me to get about three cotton kurtas made in colours that can be teamed up with both black and cream. Cream or off-white, is preferable to white, which for a busy housewife like me is impossible to keep in perfect condition. Kurtas are the shirts worn over loose fitting shalwars (trousers) and worn along with dupattas (long scarves). This shalwar suit is probably the most popular dress today for Indian and Pakistani women. Then she advised me to have to get two cotton shalwars made, one black and one cream. As for dupattas, most women have both colours in their wardrobe all the time. And of course I did. So I invested in five tailored pieces, two shalwars and three kurtas, and using the 'mix and match' principle I got six new suits.

My mother in law's eyes nearly popped out when she saw me wearing a new suit every day for the past week. "Where did you get all the money for them?" she asked me. I thought about it for a minute about the reply I should give.

"Oh, my husband is very generous!" I smiled. "He gave me the money for six new suits......"

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Email

Other Apps

Labels

Comments

Oh well done...nothing like new clothes to make you feel good. I was looking at my wardrobe recently and am pretty fed up with most of it...also old stuff. The temps here have fluctuated over the past week and it's at that awkward stage when neither winter nor summer clothes are suitable...and I don't have much "in-between" stuff!

Good!!!Now just wear them & don't worry about people thinking this or that.Lucknow is quite modern now.When I went to the Aryan restaurant(near shahara mall) recently I saw ladies wearing nooddle strap tops with jeans.

I feel the same way when I look at my clothes lately. I think it is the change of seasons that brings on the feeling of having nothing to wear.;)I enjoyed reading about the Indian fashion, I think I would quiet enjoy wearing those outfits you describe here.;)Have a lovely weekend,xo

Hi,Came along from a comment left by you on my blog a long time ago. Really like your blog and your style of penning down thoughts. Indian summers! I sure am not missing them right now. But I do miss the mangoes. Have they made their appearance yet?

Good for you! It sounds as if some members of the family are already upset that Yash got married instead of focusing on his nieces and nephews. And then there are the four children.... If you can do no right in their eyes you need to take good care of yourself.

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I am originally from Dublin in the Republic of Ireland. We have a maritime climate, neither too hot nor too cold. Cool, wet winters and warm summers. We get the odd freak weather condition, like several feet of snow, once in a while to make life interesting. Pretty ideal really.

Now I reside in Lucknow in north India. In the Indo-Gangetic plain. Cold dry winters, roasting hot summers and a humid rainy season. It seems like it's always too hot or too cold. Or too humid. Humidity is something I dread. It brings itching, rashes and all of that. Okay, too hot will work for me. So will too cold (although I hate dry cold, that's energy-sapping). But humidity is .......not at all good. And that's a euphemism if ever there was one,.

I wish to dedicate this post to my beloved and erudite rakhi brother Rummuser, who suggested this topic.

And thanks to freedigitalphotos.net for the above illustration, 'Paper Weather Icon Illustration' by SweetCrisis.

Many years ago, when I lived in Dublin, I met someone nice and started dating. I wasn't serious, I just thought we could have nice interesting discussions about India, which I found absolutely fascinating, as I was working in the Embassy of India back then. I had no intention of getting attached with a foreigner, with all the attendant cultural problems. I was happy living in Ireland and the idea of marriage couldn't have been further from my mind.

We both thought we could just keep things in control. One day, after a lot of emotional turmoil and denial, it hit us both that we were in love. Truly. Madly. Irrevocably. To the point where we couldn't live without each other. I'd known about the Indian system of arranged marriages and when it occurred to me that he would probably be married off by his family as soon as he returned to India, I felt physically ill at the thought. We are both tenacious and patient people. We realised that bringing our two worlds together would…

What Is Culture? I’m opening this blog
post with a question. What is that elusive concept which is commonly known as
‘culture? Culture is way of life. How we live. What our values are. Our customs, attitudes and perceptions. And
also, I suppose, how we express ourselves in art through, such as music, dance,
theatre and cinema. It’s quite a
comprehensive area and not too easy to define, really.

The Journey I was born in what is
commonly known as ‘the west’. I lived in Ireland for the first thirty years of
my life. When I was thirty, I married my husband and came out to India to live
here with him. That was the beginning of an interesting journey, which is still
evolving. I must have had some east/west comparison stereotypes in my head. But
in India, I found that the people I met had huge stereotypes in their heads
about what they called ‘western culture’ and ‘western way of life’. Not long
after I arrived in India, I was struck by the number of people who said things
to me like ‘in the …